Author: SOMA

As one of the closest art galleries of the Ohlauer straße and Görli, SOMA would like to share the story of our refugee neighbours.
When I was passing the Ohaluer Str. a woman was shouting, complaning that she has to pay too much tax because of these refugees here. Is it true what she says? Facing the anti refugee camp movement not only in the East side district of Berlin, but also all over Germany and Europe, people who crossed the ocean are now forced to fight here once again, against the coldness of desinterested people.
In this exbition ‘Cold Shadows – Refugee, Dealer, Afrophobia’, SOMA especially invites our neighbours to inform themselves about the refugee neighbours instead of ignoring them in a ‘dont want to know’ mode.
By presenting the art works dealing with this specific theme, SOMA would like the suffering refugee neighbours, under the cold name refugee, dealer, afrophobia to share our humane level of warmness and heart!

Nadine Stewart(Ireland/Berlin) did an art production residency which is developed to support international female artists living in Berlin at SOMA.
She will show a series of new drawings on paper and wood in this solo exhibition at SOMA Gallery. Drawing is a fundamental part of Nadine’s practice where she uses simple elements to create intricate, labor intensive images. Repetition and process are recurring themes in these works.
Initially Nadine used drawing as a means of illustrating different spaces to convey unrealized sculptural installation ideas. The progression of making these sketches of lines in space and using the simplest of elements to fill blank space on a piece of paper gave her the necessary balance to her sculptural installation works.

River Lin (Taipei, Taiwan) is an independent curator and artist working across the fields of performing and visual arts. River’s work includes site-specific performance, theatre, dance, and installations. River takes cultural studies as a point of departure and transforms the conventional and ritualistic in everyday life into performance work. River’s curatorial projects revolve around social and cultural issues, in particular the process of generational change, and have been presented by the National Theatre of Taiwan, Guling Street Avant-Guard Theatre and the Performing Art Alliance.
He is currently a board member of the Performing Arts Alliance and the curator in residence of MOVE Theatre Company.
http://riverperformance.com/

.Duo Performance
Kein Grau

René Kluge (DE) Philosopher | Yichen Huang (Taiwan) visual artist.

GO is a game of no chance and no hidden information. It works as a pure form of conflict. There is only black and white. Huang Yichen and her partner René Kluge will present durational performance. Who is going to be the winner? East vs West.

.Trio Performance
Desierto de Sillas

Cheng Ting Chen(Taiwan) |

Karina Suárez‐Bosche (Mexico) |Felipe Sánchez Luna

Desierto de Sillas is the confrontation between the individual and its chaos, confrontation with its demons, its ancestors, its identities. To look into the eyes of the other as a mirror belonging into the desert of one’s chair. It is a live collaborative improvisation performance that creates a high aesthetic experience with body intensity. An art work in which movement, electronic sound, light intervention and public interact together.
The project has been presented in Hølen, Norway, Uferstudios, Berlin and Mexico.

The swaying of the viewer – Doris Hansen’s microworlds
All concepts and realizations of Berlin-based artist Doris Hansen rely on the meta-idea of microworlds. She gives them shape in installations, reliefs, objects, and drawings, which are extraterrestrial visions of our future. The realizations are made of materials that are as far from nature as possible, like styrofoam, an invisible spatial skeleton covered by synthetic fabrics. In recent years the artist has incorporated scans of digitally colored pencil drawings and large reliefs into the microworlds. In current projects, Doris Hansen combines her characteristic highly tactile soft materials with optical elements: She increasingly experiments with LEDs casting changing artificial light and with worlds erected under acrylic glass covers like miniature hemispheres. The transparency of these object membranes as well as of the windows where Doris Hansen’s installations can regularly be seen particularly emphasize the difference between this other space and our own. The observer’s view through this membrane fits the idea of a space that will never fully disclose itself to us all too well, because it escapes our imagination and leads us back to the concrete materiality of the pieces.
Doris Hansen draws inspiration from microbiology, medieval world views, and especially comic books and science fiction from the 1950s to 1970s. So the microworlds can also be read as fictional worlds: We share Flash Gordon’s or Barbarella’s vision of the now from many decades ago, making us smile because everything has turned out so differently. However, they are also – and maybe above all – perfect worlds, not wanting to reveal, even downright disguising their manual production process as if they were not in fact elaborately handcrafted but industrially manufactured and machine-made.
Doris Hansen creates multicolored, attractive, queer worlds in which she accomplishes a deconstruction of the binary gender system, emphasized by her choice of materials and production technique: Styrofoam as a construction material attributed with masculinity is literally overlaid by colors, fabrics and floral motifs with feminine connotations, deconstructing the concept of male/female, homo/hetero as merely cultural and increasingly obsolete assignations: tertium datur. The microworlds’ plasticine inhabitants are genderless. On a symbolic level, the microworlds are perceived as contradictory. The viewer feels attracted to their incredible material presence, but at the same his/her thoughts keep rebounding on the utopias referenced. We seem suspended in a precarious balance that starts to sway the longer we are exposed to the worlds, and which, in spite of – or maybe because of – the amazing aesthetics of artificiality, causes a feeling of uneasiness in us. Because what do these worlds refer to? They always refer to ourselves as well, pointing out empty spaces in our imagination, in our future.

Liou Tsang-Ru (Taipei, Taiwan) is an emerging photographer who works mainly in the field of fashion and art portrait photography. He is keen to capture the authentic emotions of his subjects, believes that a good picture can transcend time, culture, and nation and always send out a message to viewers. He is currently visiting Europe for the first time, where he will present works produced in his hometown as well moments he has captured in Europe.
http://www.lioutsangru.tw/

Sam Lee (Seoul, South Korea) is a young fashion photographer, currently based in Berlin. Through collaborating with young designers and models in Berlin, she has found out that she is drawn to capturing the beauty of young male models. She will present works portraying young male models, backstage snapshots of fashion shows, and scenes from fashion shoots.
http://samleegraphy.com/

HYSTERIA collective is made up of members from around the world. We produce a periodical bi-annually and host feminist events internationally. HYSTERIA collaborates with other radical organisations and activists and engages with activisms that resonate with our manifesto. All our members currently work on a volunteer basis and we are continously looking for dedicated feminists to join our group and help us furthering the hysterical cause. As HYSTERIA is ever-growing and remains open to new directions, ideas and approaches, neither the collective nor the publication fulfils a static position, nor does it embody an easily defined role. However, we insist on keeping HYSTERIA at a critical distance to the uncritical mainstream and for this reason ask that all members base their work with HYSTERIA on our Manifesto and according to our constitution.

HYSTERIA is a RADICAL feminist collective. For us radicalism means countering a feminist mainstream, positioning feminism outside of the norm. It means redefining, going further, never settling. Radicalism requires an ongoing counter to liberalism and a strong class-critique. Most importantly, radical feminisms insisit on plurality within activism and acknowledge diversity of lived experiences. Our radicalism challenges hegemonic notions of ‘common sense’. Our radical feminisms challenge all binaries and we thus welcome contributions and members that do not define themsleves within gendered as well as other embodied binaries.

HYSTERIA #3 ‘Abjection’ will be launched in Berlin at SOMA gallery on the 19th of September with an exhibition curated by Nabi Nara.

Slowness is one of the biggest provocations possible today. We live in times of rapid acceleration. In physics, acceleration is the rate at which the velocity of an object/body changes over time. But acceleration is also present in the rapid capitalist production that is heating up the scales of desire and consumerism while destroying the resources of our planet. Everything needs to happen in an instant and it needs to be translated into results, products, and real-time ranking. Data streams are racing through our bodies and through the machines/apparatuses/computers that we use and mostly don’t understand. We’re starting to wear them as wearable technology, providing ourselves with constant statistics on our being, thinking, and feeling. No time for process, for critical making, creation, experience, contemplation. Brecht, writing on taking the time to think about the relationship between artists’ naïve assumptions of independence and their dependence on a socio-cultural apparatus within which they work, comes to the conclusion: Thinking that they are in possession of an apparatus, which in reality owns them, they defend an apparatus over which they no longer have any control. (Brecht GW 17, pp.1005f.) The “Blue Brain Project” is currently trying to create a synthetic, computer-based human brain. Banking machines radiate blue light non-stop. Smart phone apps like the color blue. Let’s stare into the apparatus and see the desire for the color blue evolve in a woman-machine creature, a modern-day Centauris’ virtual acceleration and material mess colliding in slow-mo. Patience. Anxiety. Fear. Fascination. Endurance. You will be on the street, staring into the machine monitor/window until the obvious blurs and starts to make sense. Take the time. Be brave. Survival in/with slowness. Slowness is beauty. Go slow: A form of industrial action in which employees work at a deliberately slow pace. (A Dictionary of Business and Management, 2014)

Supported by

German/Europe Study and Research Fund of the Faculty of Arts and Science, University of Toronto http://www.artsci.utoronto.ca/

Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies, University of Toronto http://dramacentre.utoronto.ca/